About Me
Welcome to the Stock Traders Blog! My name is Andrew. I am a trained financial professional holding a MBA degree. I am living in Southern California and have a full time job. I am at the age of 30’s and have a wonderful family. I like blogging and participating discussion on yahoo stock message board. The screen name I use on yahoo stock message board is StockTradersBlog
I started this blog after some 11 years of investing in the US stock market and lost 70% percent of my initial investment. 11 years is an awfully long period of time. Many people would think if I bought into some good company and followed a buy and hold investment strategy I should have tripled my investment. If anyone of you doubled your investment following the buy and hold strategy in the past 10 years I would be very interested to know what company you were investing into.
I started investing in US stocks back in 1998 with $100,000. That was in the pre dot com boom era. I recalled at that time Intel and Microsoft were still young and growing company. That was when I brought into Intel and some other technology companies. Not long after that the Asian financial crisis came. I sold all of my holdings after the Dow plunged some 800 points in a few days. I didn’t remember how much I lost and because of that I deemed it was too risky for me to invest in stocks. However if you were following the market during that time you would know that NASDAQ Composite index grew from about 1500 after the Asian financial crisis to its peak at 5000 at year 2000.
I remember Bob Brinker, the host of the famous financial radio talk show (The Money Talk) recommended buying into the stock market and not to miss a single day after the Dow dropped 800 points during the Asian financial crisis. I didn’t follow his advice and I missed the greatest return of the dot com boom. I didn’t return to the stock market until after the peak of the dot com boom. I looked at a number of technology companies for the past five years and thought about Warren Buffett’s buy and hold strategy. I felt Warren Buffet was so right. If I had followed his advice I wouldn’t have sold my holding during the Asian financial crisis and I would have tripled my money. So I bought a number of technology big names, like Intel, Cisco, Juniper Network, Avnt (Acquired by SNPS), EMC and I held them for the next 7 years. The result you know was a disaster. The market dropped a lot after the dot com bubble busted. It went back up slowly to a peak in the second half of 2007. After that we went into a big recession till now.
Just a few months ago near the recent bottom of the stock market I decided that the buy and hold strategy wasn’t working. I sold all my holdings again total lost was about $70,000 and I start investing in a new way – Trading. I don’t believe in buy and hold any more and I don’t think anyone should buy and hold for the next several years unless you think another period like the dot com boom is coming.
